


On the Transitory Nature of Earthly Concerns

by Sholio



Category: Iron Fist (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Artists, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Banter, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-16
Updated: 2019-06-16
Packaged: 2020-05-12 20:49:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19236841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: For the promptAn AU where Ward is a fucked-up, belligerent artist like the Vantablack guy.





	On the Transitory Nature of Earthly Concerns

**Author's Note:**

> _... Bonus points for really weird descriptions of bleeding-edge avant-garde modern art!_
> 
> For the [Defenders Prompt Fest](https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1243168.html) on DW. This got away from me a little bit.

"Get the fuck out of my dirt, Danny."

"It feels good on my feet."

Ward fumes quietly from ten feet away, but the problem is that he cannot reach Danny without walking through the dirt that he has spent the last six hours painstakingly raking exactly smooth in preparation for the gallery opening tomorrow. Dirt that Danny is now leaving bare footprints in, because of course he is.

"The idea is that people are supposed to walk in it, right?" Danny asks, and ducks the rake when Ward takes a swipe at him.

"Tomorrow! Not today!" Ward takes a few deep breaths, closes his eyes, and tries to work on some of the grounding exercises his therapist has been having him practice. Unfortunately the only happy thought he can currently focus on is the mental image of whacking Danny with the rake, which at least is better than thinking about his last fight with Joy, which ended on a very final note on both sides.

He took two diazapam earlier and it's taking the edge off things, but not as much as he'd like. He misses drinking. It was nice to be a little bit drunk all the time. He sort of recognizes why it's a good thing that he stopped (having a lot to do with going from a little bit drunk all of the time, to a lot drunk most of the time), but there are times when he seriously regrets it. At least half those times involve his sister, the other half are, basically, the entire rest of his life, particularly when he sends off the child support checks to Bethany, who is currently living in San Francisco, as far away from him as she can get.

"Ward. Hey." 

He opens his eyes. Danny is holding out a hand and looking like an apologetic golden retriever. "C'mon, give me the rake and I'll fix it."

Ward considers this, then extends the rake handle-first. The worst thing Danny can do is fuck it up even more, and then he'll have to fix it, and oh look, it's a metaphor for their entire childhoods! The only thing they have in common is that they are both incredible disappointments to their parents, which Ward considers massively unfair because _he_ is fucking famous and, while not precisely wealthy, at least he's not currently living in a camper van perma-parked in the parking lot of a hipster grocery store in Red Hook. (Danny's parents are friends of the owners.)

Danny hums happily, raking dirt. At the moment he is a perfect poster child for exactly the kind of people Ward doesn't want to attract to the opening (but is gloomily aware will come anyway), with a hipster beard and long curly hair pulled up in a man-bun and a T-shirt with the faded remains of some kind of save-the-rainforest type slogan.

"Your dirt should have good energy for tomorrow," Danny remarks, raking it into smooth curves.

Not that Ward is in a position to throw stones since he went to art school, but Danny spent three years backpacking around the Himalayas, learned to speak 0.02% of half a dozen languages, made a bunch of friends he still writes to (mostly other backpackers), and now he randomly talks about feng shui, qi, the impermanence of existence, and so forth. Ward has a sneaking suspicion that Danny knows way less than he thinks he knows about any of this stuff, but Ward also doesn't know enough about any of the things that Danny is now supposedly an expert in to prove it.

"Whatever." He throws himself on the floor, pats his pocket for cigarettes, then remembers he recently quit that too. Fuck this. He needs to be drunk, or high, or _something._ It used to be that he'd spend the week around a gallery opening totally wrecked. He's kind of gotten a handle on it these days. With age comes maturity, or whatever. The diazapam and Xanax helps.

He takes out his phone and checks the advance buzz for the opening. Then he flings the phone across the room, bouncing it off the wall with a crunch.

"Fucking Davos!"

"The art critic for the _Bulletin?"_ Danny says from the dirt room. "What'd he say?"

Ward scrambles to retrieve the phone, because how can he properly hate a review when he can't remember exactly what it says? "'The derivative, shallow work of a has-been, or more accurately a never-was'," he reads aloud, "'and a poor imitation of the New York Earth Room' -- no it fucking isn't, _On the Transitory Nature of Earthly Concerns_ is all about _change,_ the goddamn Earth Room is _static,_ that's the point of it -- 'but what else can one expect from the artist who brought us the ill-conceived _Six Urinals in a Parking Garage_ , let alone the utter debacle of _Local Solutions for Global Problems_ ' --will people stop talking about that already?"

Brutally panned by the New York art scene, _Local Solutions for Global Problems_ had consisted of a white room with a pot of bubbling spaghetti on a hot plate on a pedestal in the middle of the room. Gallery patrons were invited to dip out some with the provided wooden spoons and throw it against the walls. The installation had lasted an hour and a half before Ward, trashed out of his mind, had fallen against it, knocked it over, and gave himself second degree burns.

"Any publicity is supposed to be good publicity, right?" Danny says cheerfully. "I mean, he's doing you a favor, really."

"Oh, and listen to this part -- 'a further unnecessary outing from a pretentious hack' -- _pretentious_ , that's rich, coming from a guy who calls himself _Davos_ , no last name. I guess because Madonna and Prince were already taken? Talk about _pretentious_ \--"

"Just don't let it bother you, Ward. You don't have to care unless you want to. It's only one person's opinion."

"The art world runs on opinions, you can't just _not care_. Help me think of a suitably scathing reply. They're getting a letter to the editor over this. _Pretentious hack!"_

"Your dirt's smooth," Danny says instead, hopping over the edge of the barricade onto the gallery floor, scattering dirt everywhere and leaving bare dirty prints on the white floor. Ward glowers at him. "... right. Sorry! Is there a broom?"

"I fucking hate you," Ward says, and goes to get a broom.

He pauses, though, on his way past the huge windows looking out on the night city. He's not going to admit it -- not to Joy, and definitely not to Danny, though he might consider telling his therapist one of these days -- but he likes the quiet, solemn feeling of a gallery at night. He likes the self-important feeling of getting to be here when all the patrons are gone. One of the few things he actually does appreciate about not being drunk and/or high all the time is moments like this: after the last-minute flurry of preparations begins to wind down, the quiet calm of the gallery the night before a show opening.

Or maybe that's the diazapam talking. If it weren't for that, he knows he'd be a tangled ball of desperate nerves (even more than he already is), frantically refreshing every art-news site in the city and awaiting in an agony of nerves the full swirl of publicity, the reviews, the interviews, the pans and the accolades, the copycats, the awards, the roller coaster of riding high on a glowing review one minute and crashing into the pit of a scathing _Times_ editorial the next.

Still, there is a solemnity to the city at night, especially viewed through the glass like this, rather than down there where the streets smell like urine and the junkies come out after dark. It's calming. Tranquil. Maybe this is how Danny felt in the Himalayas.

After a little while, Ward goes onward in search of a broom, can't find one, and comes back to find that Danny has cleaned up the floor with paper towels and has his shoes back on again. He's sitting with his back against the wall next to the table with the coffeepot, phone in hand, typing.

Ward pours himself a styrofoam cup of the sludgy dregs of the coffee and looks around for his phone 'til he finds that Danny has neatly left it on the edge of the table near the coffeepot.

"I'm texting Colleen," Danny declares, unprompted. "So she can tell everybody at the dojo and the center to come to your show. It'll be _great."_

Oh _good,_ that's exactly what he needs, all of Danny's hippie and new-age and homeless friends making a great impression on the critics tomorrow night. Or rather, tonight -- it's after midnight, and he's suddenly, brutally tired. He leans on the wall and then, when that's not enough, slides down to sit with his back against it.

"Sooooo I talked to Joy yesterday," Danny say in a casually-not-casual kind of way.

"Did she tell you she's not speaking to me again?"

"She said you had a fight," Danny says carefully. "She, uh ... she wishes you'd come back to the company."

"That's exactly what she said, is it."

"Um ... not in so many words, exactly."

"Did it involve the words 'family disappointment'? Or is it only me she says that to?"

Out of the three of them, Joy is the only one who turned out to have their parents' aptitude for business. The good child, Ward thinks with a bitter edge. The non-disappointment. It doesn't matter how many awards he wins, doesn't matter if he has a show in Paris or Prague next year. He still won't be Joy.

"You should cut her some slack," Danny says, and Ward's eyes snap open.

"Cut _her_ slack? I am the one who's fucking trying here."

Danny takes a deep breath and looks like he's not sure what to do with his hands. He puts the phone down and picks it up again. "I know you're trying, Ward, but -- I guess -- it's like the two of you are talking past each other, or something. You don't hear what the other one is saying at all."

"I'd say 'family disappointment' is pretty unambiguous."

"Don't you think that maybe she's going through stuff too, though?"

The only thing that stops Ward from bouncing his phone off the side of Danny's head is that he knows Danny well enough to know that Danny has said all of this to Joy too. _Could you cut Ward some slack? He's going through stuff too, you know ..._

He's going to have a _lot_ to talk about at his next therapy appointment. His therapist is probably heartily sick of hearing about his relationship with his sister. Too bad.

"Danny," Ward says, "shut up or I'll stuff that rake down your throat. Don't you have a camper van to go back to?"

"I was actually thinking I'd sleep in here tonight. I can take a sink-bath in the restroom --"

_"For fuck's sake,"_ Ward says, having a horrifying premonition of Danny waking up and rolling out of a closet in the middle of the gallery event, half covered in dirt and wearing clothes he hasn't changed in three days. "Take a shower at my place, then. Christ. I thought you normally showered at the dojo. Did Colleen kick you out again?"

"Colleen and I are on a hiatus kind of thing right now, and her girlfriend's over tonight," Danny says, looking a little hangdog, before brightening up, "but we're still friends, of course."

"Of course," Ward echoes bleakly. Danny is friends with all his exes. Hell, he's probably friends with Ward's exes too. Meanwhile, the mother of Ward's child moved across the country to get away from him.

"Are you sure you don't mind if I come over to your place? I don't want to impose," says Danny, whose entire life is largely based around imposing on people and being so goddamn good-natured that no one can bring themselves to object to it.

For that matter, come to think of it, Ward can't actually figure out the exact chain of events that resulted in Danny helping him with the gallery installation tonight. He just kind of showed up, the way Danny does -- the way Danny has been doing ever since they were kids. By all reasonable standards, Ward thinks Danny should probably have disappeared from his and Joy's life a long time ago, because that's what happens when you grow up and fall out of touch with the other kids you used to play with not because you liked each other but because your parents were friends.

And yet he keeps showing up. And it occurs to Ward that not rattling around alone in an empty apartment tonight might be a good thing. There are still bars open at this time of night.

"Oh, why the hell not," he says grudgingly.

Danny scrambles to his feet, and Ward lets Danny give him a hand up. He pauses to lean the rake up carefully beside the entrance to the dirt room, thinks about it and moves it to the other side, and takes a look at Danny's dirt-raking efforts. He's not going to acknowledge it, but it does look pretty flat. Can't say anything about the energy flow in there, though.

He adjusts the plaque on the wall with the artist's statement and the piece's title in curly script.

"This one's because of me, right?" Danny says, hanging around as Ward picks up trash and tries to leave the gallery as immaculate as possible for final setup tomorrow afternoon, when the caterers will start showing up.

"This one what's because of you?"

"This piece?"

Ward stops and looks at him. "In what possible way does this have anything to do with you?"

Danny waves a hand at the title: _On the Transitory Nature of Earthly Concerns._ "I mean, like, it's obviously inspired by --"

"It is _not,_ " Ward snaps, a wave of horror washing over him.

"-- all those times we talked about Buddhist philosophy when I got back from the Himalayas --"

"I don't remember any of that." Mostly because he was drunk and/or high for most of it. "You had nothing to do with it, it's the last six months of my life, stay out of it."

"But you're the one who always says that you put little pieces of yourself in your work --" Danny pauses, looking like something has just occurred to him. "You don't mean that literally, do you?"

"Of course not!"

"Oh, thank God. Because there's this artist I know in Brooklyn who --"

"Danny, will you _please_ not make me regret giving you a couch to crash on tonight."

"Okay," Danny says agreeably, and then he nudges Ward's shoulder with his own. "Your opening is going to go great. Everyone's going to love it."

_"Derivative,"_ Ward mutters. "Hack."

**Author's Note:**

> I assume in this universe Davos's family never ended up in K'un Lun and therefore he is a very intense and very Extra(TM) art critic instead. He and Ward glare at each other over canapes at art openings.
> 
> This is [the New York Earth Room](https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/11/02/the-un-changing-ever-changing-earth-room/).


End file.
